The Same Desert Twice
by CherryBerry12
Summary: "Let him be a coward tonight; he will have no choice but to be brave tomorrow because, brave or not, the fight will come for him anyway." Genma/Baki, the night before the Shinobi World War.


**A/N**: **this is my second-to-last rarepair bingo fic, yall! how wild is that? i still have a ton of stuff i haven't technically posted, but hopefully i'll make bingo sometime later tonight...**

**in other news, i hope you all enjoy this fic! it's one with barely any content-nothing at all on ao3. if you like it, please comment/fave/you know the drill. **

**thanks for reading! **

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Genma always thought of the desert as a solitary place.

That's what a desert was supposed to be, wasn't it? It's dictionary definition levels of obvious. Miles of nothing but sand and sun, not a single damn ramen stand, house, or tent in the days' walk over the wasteland that separated Suna and Konoha. Take a trip or two from one country or the other and you'd see all you ever needed to see: a shitton of sand, and not much else.

It's a place so massive he's never been able to cross it in one go, has never had any choice but to stop for the night right in the middle of it. He'll set out his tent and his teammates will set out their tents and they'll get a nice fire going, and if they aren't on a tracking mission they can be a little risky and build it tall—not with anything they find in the desert, because anything that'll burn in a desert is already burnt, but with whatever Izumo or Kotetsu thought to pack away in one of their neat little sealing scrolls.

They'll sit in a circle and maybe they'll talk a little, start off with some light-hearted jokes, maybe Aoba will try to be serious and talk through mission strategy, maybe he'll give up and Izumo and Kotetsu's domestic small talk will fill the silence.

Their voices won't echo but will project infinitely; the desert is not space but a lack of space, and the noises they make are eaten up by the sheer amount of nothingness around them. The fire will snap and maybe Genma will think he sees a lizard running between dunes, maybe it's just the sand blowing in clouds, but every night it occurs to him that they really might just be all alone out there, that the prickles he'll feel at the back of his neck are his own imagining, because he'll look out over miles and all he will see is sand: he'll stare, expecting either a blurry figure to rise from miles away or another fire to come to life across planes of absolute emptiness, but no one will ever show, and no other fires will ever be lit.

It will be him, his team, and their dwindling bonfire until morning comes, and then they will continue on towards Suna or home.

At least, that's how it usually goes. That's what Genma has come to accept as routine.

Genma has never really liked the desert for what seems to him very obvious reasons; he likes close spaces, bumping elbows with strangers on the streets, knocking knees at the bar. Konoha is nothing but a monument to man's ability to conquer population density—it's a city of unsteady high-rises forced to lean on their neighbors for support, upper-floor apartments arranged on top of family-owned groceries like stacks of books.

It's chaotic, and it's a kind of chaos Genma loves: he can't so much as walk two doors over to do his laundry without seeing Kakashi, stripped down to his last pair of pants and rattiest wife beater, reading on top of a chugging washing machine. Without seeing Kurenai waddling past the window, arms wrapped around her pregnant belly, any number of her students or Asuma's students trailing behind her.

That, Genma likes. It's closeness without the necessity of contact—it's a small village. They'll see each other again. He can nod to Kakashi and wave to Kurenai and carry on with his day.

The desert is the opposite of that: it's no small village but an endless emptiness, and if he's lucky to have a friend or two there with him, Genma isn't letting them out of his sight.

Today, however, he sits alone in the desert with no fire, no friends, and he wishes, just this once, that the desert were just a little more private.

Today, the desert isn't a desert exactly but a holding cell for tens of thousands of bodies. As incomprehensible as it has seemed on his missions before, Genma finds himself unable to even find the actual desert under or beyond the sheer number of people; even if he stands he won't be able to find the boundaries of it, the threshold where, theoretically, the people would give way again to pure desert.

Genma sighs, and tugs down the sleeves of his sweater. Earlier in the day the heat had been stifling, the humidity inescapable in the crowd, but in the desert there just isn't anywhere for the heat to go, nothing to hold it in place after the sun goes down.

It gets colder, and the cold comes fast.

For every few shinobi there's a campfire for them to gather around, and the shinobi are as numerous as the desert stars Genma can barely see through all of the light pollution. He's somewhere in the middle of it, wedged between a platoon from Kiri, several small squads from Kumo.

It's the clothes that give them away—they've all begrudgingly exchanged the headbands from their own village but it's one symbolic action in the face of many—wearing the same headband won't strip away years of camaraderie between close allies, won't break down barriers rightfully built between former enemies. Symbols take time to build meaning, and a few days isn't going to cut it.

Somewhere, there are crowds from Konoha too but Genma just needs a minute. Several minutes, maybe an hour maybe seven, just time that's all his own to burrow down in the pit of sand where he's been sitting and watching, waiting and trying not to think too hard about tomorrow.

There are expectations among other Konoha shinobi—to be an example, to keep his cool. To put on a smile and let the others think,_ we've got nothing to worry about_. He's over thirty and that puts him on the older end of the spectrum, the responsible end where he's supposed to act calm not only for his sake, but for the sake of the younger, less experienced fighters around him.

Tonight just isn't the night for that, he thinks, letting sand run through his fingers, grains of it sticking under his nails. Let him be a coward tonight; he has no choice but to be brave tomorrow because, brave or not, the fight will come for him anyway.

The other shinobi crowd in among themselves and their anxious whispers carry over to him, shifting in the wind like the dunes of sand around them that do nothing to muffle the sound. _Are they even human? _a male shinobi whispers to another. He's not even out of his teens—soft and boyish, he sits with him knees pulled up and his arms wrapped around them, his Shinobi headband tied loosely around his arm.

A woman lying on her back across from him laughs. _Wrong question—we wanna know if they'll die like people do. That's what we need._

Several campfires away, another woman holds a rosary, thumbing beads across the band so fast Genma thinks sourly that her hands ought to have cramped by now.

They, much like him, might not live past the next day. Genma's lived through a lot—he was a teen when the Kyubi attacked the village, already a jonin when Oto and Suna invaded. At no point has he ever been too young to die. It ought to be easy to tuck this right in line with those experiences but the fit isn't right; the anticipation drags and tomorrow a war is just going to happen—like a switch being flipped on, there'll be a split-second switch between waiting and an all-out fight for his life. It's planned chaos, narrowed down to the time, the exact place, orderly as a neat little invitation jotted down on paper and delivered in the mail.

Now there's nothing to do but wait and ruminate on that. When Suna invaded… There was no preparation, none of this type of absolute tedium. It just _began_, and there was no time to really _think_ about it. Genma isn't sure if he wants the wait to pass instantly or to continue forever, with the next day never actually coming.

An older man, maybe ten or so years his senior, takes out a kunai, checks the handle on one, licks his thumb and polishes a scratch on another. When he holds it out to the fire to make sure he'd gotten it, the glare of the fire reflects blood-red off the metal. Somewhere, someone is crying, muffled sobs under the hum of conversation.

This is all there is until tomorrow, and then there might not even be that.

A few dozen yards away someone is walking between the clusters of people, passing by each without so much as pausing, his feet sinking into the sand as he moves. The half of his face that isn't covered by his white head-wrapping is twisted into an annoyed frown, the kind the chunin in the Hokage's office make at Anko when she turns in a mission report with half the spaces left empty and they're too afraid to say anything to her.

Genma could say nothing, and he could keep his quiet little hell in the desert undisturbed.

Or he could try to kill some time.

"Never thought I'd be running into you again," Genma calls, tilting his head back and lifting a hand so Baki can see where he is. "Especially in a place like this," he adds. A few heads turn towards him, and for a moment the murmuring is partially silenced. It does nothing to ease the tension.

Baki's eyes snap to Genma and then narrow suspiciously when he seems to recognize him. Even if Baki's recollection of Genma isn't the kindest, he dutifully makes his way over and gives a polite nod in acknowledgement. "It has been a long while." He turns his head to look around them, at the shinobi surrounding them. The boy with the headband wrapped around his arm straightens and turns away when he realizes he's been caught staring at them. "Unfortunately these times are not much better than three years before."

"Maybe they are, maybe they aren't." Baki nods without really seeming to accept the sentiment and finally Genma stretches out a hand to the empty space across from him. "Well, go ahead and have a seat. It's different enough that we can talk a moment, right?"

Baki doesn't move, but replies, "A man will never walk the same desert twice."

"What's that?"

"An idiom. It means—the desert is always changing. That is its nature. So too are our lives." He moves his feet, and gestures to the striped footprint left behind. "This will be gone in hours; minutes perhaps. It's a small mark that I've made, but none are permanent."

"Yeah, okay. I think we've got something similar back at home. Something about stepping into the same river? Deserts aren't as common where I'm from, yanno." Genma scratches his chin, and thinks on it for another moment. "Actually, you do know."

Baki blinks, but does not reply. Genma can't help but feel he's only drawn more attention to them, that the girl with the prayer beads and the old man with his kunai and the damn kid with his headband-armband are all staring now. Genma refuses to check to find out.

He's probably going to die tomorrow, why the hell not cause a little scene? What was wrong with shedding a few regrets in the meantime? "Hayate was a friend of mine, and I've never forgotten about him."

"Hayate." Baki doesn't even seem to know the name of the man he'd killed.

"They were—the ANBU, I mean. They investigated, figured was someone from your village who killed him, some kind of wind jutsu." Genma lowers his head a moment, and shrugs. "I got a good enough idea of what you can do at the chunin exams. There weren't too many other shinobi in the village who could've or would've done something like that."

Tellingly, Baki doesn't try to deny it. "Is this why you've called me over, then?"

Genma can't say exactly why he called him over, so he shrugs again. Baki seems to read something in that expression, and finally relents and sits down across from Genma, squeezed into a tiny square of space that almost has him back to back with a woman who shoots him a dirty look before scooting away from him.

Genma waits a moment for some biting retort, but Baki doesn't rise to the bait, only sighs. "It is important we are not weighed down too heavily by the past. Tomorrow's enemy is much greater than individual animosities."

"Yeah, I was there to hear the Kazekage's speech." Genma switches tactics, finds a new soreness to project. "He's got some surprisingly optimistic ideas. Crazy how just a few years ago he was crippling our genin and murdering his countrymen."

"He's grown a good deal in a very short time," Baki replies diplomatically, his eyes sharpening. Just as quickly, it evaporates, and he smiles, his face-covering shifting. It's a tense smile, close-lipped and curved like a finger only partly crooked, because no one ever smiles with too much ease on the eve of a battle, but it seems genuine enough. "He has come a very long way, and no matter what tomorrow brings I am proud of him."

Genma can't bring himself to follow that with another jab, and Baki instead adds, "It was a boy from your village who taught him that. Who was able to change Gaara, when even I had continued to fail at it. Naruto Uzumaki."

"Well." Genma sighs. "All in all, it seems like he's turned out fine enough. I'm sure you had some hand in it—I've met Naruto more than enough times to know he would've never come up with anything that coherent."

Baki bows his head. "I did my duty to him."

For a moment, Genma thinks he can see what could make Baki a good teacher—he's steady, even in the least steady of times. Hard to unsettle, and Genma remembers that too, remembers how Baki hadn't flinched at the thought of fighting him three years ago, how he'd stood like a wall between Genma and his students.

He can, at the very least, find a small bit of respect for Baki, former enemy or not. "There were two others, weren't there?" Genma remembers a boy forfeiting, a girl with a massive fan on her back. "You brought a whole team to the exam finals."

"Temari and Kankuro. His brother and sister," Baki says, the rumble of his voice rising in a way that tells Genma this is familiar ground for him. "She learned her first wind-style jutsu from me… They say now she is one of the foremost experts in it."

"You don't say." Genma finally works up the nerve to turn around and see if anyone who was watching them before had lost interest, and is surprised to find they've all returned to talking with their comrades. That, even in a crowd of shinobi, they've been given some measure of privacy.

"They are all afraid," Baki answers without him asking. "Fear is natural, and fear empowers a shinobi who cannot empower themselves through sheer will alone." Genma follows his gaze, and sees he's watching the girl with the prayer beads, her thumb flicking through them like a game of marbles, beads clacking together as they race around the cord. "You have no children."

Genma raises an eyebrow. "No wife either. You got an interest in that?"

"Students, I meant. You are a special jounin."

"Oh." Is he disappointed to hear that?

Baki clarifies, "I was curious as to why you were sitting alone. It seemed unlike a Konoha shinobi."

"Yeah, well." Genma blows out a hot breath, and rubs the heel of his hand into his eye. "It's a long day, and if I'm lucky, tomorrow will be even longer."

Baki hums, and nods. "Tomorrow will be a challenge." He hesitates, which seems unlike him, then adds, unprompted, "I apologize for what I did to your friend. It was… it is difficult now to imagine myself as I was back then, but I believed what I was doing was just. That does not mean, however, that your friend deserved to die, or that it was right for me to kill him."

"Ah…" Genma is caught far enough off guard that he isn't quite sure what to say. "I appreciate it, I guess."

"The Kazekage—the current Kazekage's father, I mean. He was a man, Rasa, who was also a very good friend of mine." Baki takes a long pause, and Genma is fairly certain he hears enough in his voice to suggest_ a very good friend_ barely begins to cover it. "It… it does not excuse my actions, but I lost a dear friend as well. To Orochimaru, because we chose to trust Orochimaru."

"Well, like you said. That's an old desert, isn't it? This is a new one." Genma looks around him and, yeah, maybe it really is something special they've been able to do. A trio of shinobi from Iwa are standing along the camp, the sand rising under their hands to form protective barriers, a squad from Konoha there to stabilize them with katon. "And it looks like this is a pretty different desert, all things considered. Can't say I've seen too many like it before."

"Let me share with you another saying, then—a single grain does very little." Baki flicks one off of his sleeve as if making a point, and then spreads out his hands. "A sea of grains can do much more. It will be my pleasure to fight alongside you tomorrow, whatever tomorrow might bring."

The wind blows, the cool breeze disrupting Baki's face covering and exposing the rest of his nose, the thin line of his mouth. He doesn't seem at all bothered by the silence that falls between them, and Genma can't help but marvel how the proximity of a single person can make even a desert feel small. Comfortable.

Just the tiniest bit like home.

The corner of Genma's mouth ticks into a smile, and before he can even think to repress it, it grows into a full grin. "Well. I'm looking forward to it, then."


End file.
